Hi, this is part 1 of my science based targets lecture. The lecture's broken into five fairly short videos and then I'll have a case so you can practice developing science-based targets after the lecture's over. The way the lectures organized, we're going to have this overview. And then the videos two through four, will talk about the three approved approaches for setting science-based targets, according to the Science-Based Target Initiative. And then the fifth video's going to have an idea that tries to address some of the deficiencies in these approaches. And I'm also going to give you an incredibly simple approach to having a science-based target. Now, science-based targets are trying to link business goals with ecological limits. And the idea is really based on context-based sustainability. In fact, Mark McElroy had developed that context-based sustainability notions applied it to target settings for Ben & Jerry's and Cadbury Creamery. In context-based sustainability we're trying to set targets so corporate impacts are within the safe operating boundaries of planet earth, or of ecosystems. And the challenge with context-based sustainability is allocating the budget of the valuable resource, in this case, carbon emissions. You may say, why is that a valuable resource? Well, because economic activity is often tied to carbon emissions. We have something called decoupling where we're beginning to see some economic growth without a corresponding increase in carbon emissions and that's probably going to be the way that we're going to address climate change decouple carbon emissions from economic growth, but in the meantime, carbon emissions are a valuable resource. And it has to be allocated in some sort of a fair manner, and I'll try to talk about how each of the science-based target approaches deals with allocation. Now, we're looking at climate change and carbon dioxide emissions. In 2009, a really important paper was published that estimated the amount of CO2 that could be emitted over the next 40 years from 2010 to 2050, to have about a 50/50 chance of staying under 2 degrees Centigrade of warming. That budget was about a trillion tons of CO2. Because of recent emissions, the budget now, as of the end of 2016, is more like 816 billion tons, so under that trillion number. And as I said, the real challenges allocating the resource or the budget in a fair manner. Now, there's a lot of different pathways that we can get on this diagrams are called representative concentration pathways, and we're interested in those that lead to 2 degrees of warming like the green pathway. Now, it's not where the lines ends up that matters. It turns out it's the area under the curve that's important. It's the accumulated emissions over time, that apparently determined the resulting in temperature. As a real brief side, the intended nationally determined commitments, the INDCs at the 2015 Paris Meeting, right now put us on a pathway to about 3.5 degree C. Now, those are non-binding [COUGH] and so this assumes that 3.5 degrees assumes that those commitments are met. So you can see that Paris agreement has a long way to go to get us to 2 degrees of warming or less. Right now the best estimates for a 50 to 60% probability of staying under 2 degrees warming are that emissions need to be reduced 50 to 70% by 2050. So that's about 2.5% a year but again it's not just reducing to 50% current emissions by 2050. It's how it's done. Also, this is globally. If industrialized countries accept more of the burden, then their reduction might be closer to 80%. As I just said, it's not just getting to 40% or at 80% reduction, it's how it's done and there's a lot of pathways that simply don't work even though they will eventually get to that, 40, 50, 70% reduction. Here's what I call a last minute path, and it doesn't work because the accumulation of emissions from 2010 to 2050 exceeds the 2 degree budget. The important thing is the area into the curve. The accumulated emissions and the green area is just too large. This pathway satisfies the 2 degree budget requirement and it has more reductions earlier when they should be easier to identify and implement over time, is likely that emissions will be harder to find and more expensive to implement. So it's not just getting to the 50% or the 70% decrease but it's how it's done that's important. We want pathways that are effective, satisfy the 2 degree requirement. But are also economically feasible and are minimally disruptive. Now, to help companies prepare for reduction, some people advocate what's called a peak and decline pathway. The peak and decline pathway produces extra emissions during the first few years as companies reduce their emissions increases to zero. So emissions are still increasing a little bit, but at a slower and slower rate and eventually there's no increase at all and they get on to a decline path. To have the same accumulated emission as the immediate decline paths that we've been looking at, the extra emissions, which is the area shown in gold, have to be off set later on by more reductions. And those are shown in red, these two areas need to be pretty close in size. So that we're assured that the peak and decline accumulated emissions really satisfy the two grid budget. And again, it's accumulated emissions that matter. So the timing isn't too important but the accumulation is. Now, as we go through the three approaches that the science-based target initiative advocates, we're going to look at a couple of criteria. One is that the pathway is one that's recognized scientifically. So there's a couple that the science-based targets initiative recommends. One is the International Energy Agency 2 degree scenario, IEA 2DS, or they also recommend using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report 5 pathways, so that's IPCC AR5. The science-based targets initiative says that targets need to set at least 5 years out but really, if you're thinking about climate, probably out to 2030, or 2050 is even better, a real long term plan. The science-based targets initiative said that Scope 1 and 2 emissions should be covered, and Scope 3, if they're material. And they define materiality as 40% or more of total greenhouse gas emissions. We're going to see that some of the approaches only look at Scope 1 and there's a good reason for that. So there is some discord here about what is covered and what's useful. There is concern about fairness and we're going to see convergence approaches and compression approaches. The idea here is that if a company has already made a big effort to reduce its emissions and then it tries to set a science-based target that requires, I don't know, 3% reduction every year. Because it's starting from a lower baseline and it's going to reduce it 3% a year, those reductions at the very end of the time period, 2030 or whatever, could be very difficult to find, and very expensive. That means that a high emitting company has an unfair advantage. Because if they're only reducing 3%, a lot of their emissions are going to be the easy, the low hanging fruit. And they won't bear the burden that the low emitting company, who's made efforts beforehand to improve his performance are going to have to bear. So it's kind of a cost efficiency argument. And I'll show you some examples of how that might happen. Finally, and this is a most challenging bullet point probably, different industrial sectors have different rates of growth. And different opportunities to reduce or mitigate carbon reductions. So a primary industry like, say steel making, may have very few ways to reduce its emissions. And so applying the same criteria, yet 3.5% a year, may not be fair. Now, some sectors may be growing a lot and have already said that because we don't have complete decoupling, economic growth suggests increased emissions and so we have something called sector-based approaches that try to recognize differential growth across industrial sectors and differential mitigation opportunities. Let me summarize real quickly this overview. First of all, a science-based targets are based on context-based sustainability, which immediately applies as an allocation issue here. And the context in our case is going to be the carbon budget from now through 2050 or 2100 which I said was about 816 billion metric tons of CO2 or CO2 equivalents through 2050. It's accumulated emissions that matter, so just reducing emissions eventually doesn't matter, it's how you get there and what you've accumulated in the meantime. There's a lot of pathways, some are better than others and some work and some don't. And finally, there's a lot of criteria that these science-based targets should satisfy ideally, and we'll talk about that as we move forward. So thanks, this is the end of video one, and it's time to go to video two, where we'll look at absolute contraction approach to setting science-based targets. Thanks.
